Schenkenberg is the curator of “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was a San Francisco-based artist who melded traditional craft practices with industrial materials to make some of the most distinctive sculpture of the twentieth century. The exhibition includes 80 works including sculpture, works on paper and collages spanning the start of Asawa’s career at Black Mountain College in western North Carolina through to the intricate and complicated ceiling-hanging works of her later years. It is the first museum exhibition of Asawa’s work in 12 years and the first away from the West Coast. The exhibition is on view until February 16, 2019. A catalogue is forthcoming from Yale University Press. Amazon offers it for pre-order for $40.

Angela Fraleigh is included in “The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S.” at the Shiva Gallery at John Jay College. The exhibition includes artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Senga Nengudi and Suzanne Lacy and was curated by Monica Fabijanska. It is on view through November 2. On Wednesday, October 3, the Shiva will host an evening symposium related to the exhibition.

Fraleigh is a painter and sculptor whose work engages issues of desire and power. Her work is in the collections of the Kemper Art Museum in Kansas City and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston."

"Meanwhile, years of semantic slippage had happened without me noticing. Suddenly the surging interest in fashion, the dad hats, the stupid pin companies, the lack of sellouts, it all made sense. Authenticity has expanded to the point that people don’t even believe in it anymore. And why should we? Our friends work at SSENSE, they work at Need Supply. They are starting dystopian lifestyle brands. Should we judge them for just getting by? A Generation-Z-focused trend report I read last year clumsily posed that “the concept of authenticity is increasingly deemed inauthentic.” It goes further than that. What we are witnessing is the disappearance of authenticity as a cultural need altogether.

Under authenticity, the value of a thing decreases as the number of people to whom it is meaningful increases. This is clearly no longer the case. Take memes for example. “Meme” circa 2005 meant lolcats, the Y U NO guy and grimy neckbeards on 4chan. Within 10 years “meme” transitioned from this one specific subculture to a generic medium in which collective participation is seen as amplifying rather than detracting from value.

In a strange turn of events, the mass media technologies built out during the heady authenticity days have had a huge part in facilitating this new mass media culture. The hashtag, like, upvote, and retweet are UX patterns that systematize endorsement and quantify shared value. The meme stock market jokers are more right than they know; memes are information commodities. But unlike indie music 10 years ago the value of a meme is based on its publicly shared recognition. From mix CDs to nationwide Spotify playlists. With information effortlessly transferable at zero marginal cost and social platforms that blast content to the top of everyone’s feed, it’s difficult to for an ethics based on scarcity to sustain itself.

K-HOLE and Box1824 captured the new landscape in their breakthrough 2014 report “Youth Mode.” They described an era of “mass indie” where the search for meaning is premised on differentiation and uniqueness, and proposed a solution in “Normcore.” Humorously, nearly everyone mistook Normcore for being about bland fashion choices rather than the greater cultural shift toward accepting shared meanings. It turns out that the aesthetics of authenticity-less culture are less about acting basic and more about playing up the genericness of the commodity as an aesthetic category. LOT2046’s delightfully industrial-supply-chain-default aesthetics are the most beautiful and powerful rendering of this. But almost everyone is capitalizing on the same basic trend, from Vetements and Virgil Abloh (enormous logos placed for visibility in Instagram photos are now the norm in fashion) to the horribly corporate Brandless. Even the names of boring basics companies like “Common Threads” and “Universal Standard” reflect the the popularity of genericness, writes Alanna Okunn at Racked. Put it this way: Supreme bricks can only sell in an era where it’s totally fine to like commodities.

Crucially, this doesn’t mean that people don’t continue to seek individuation. As I’ve argued elsewhere exclusivity is fundamental to any meaning-amplifying strategy. Nor is this to delegitimize some of the recognizable advancements popularized alongside the first wave of mass authenticity aesthetics. Farmer’s markets, the permaculture movement, and the trend of supporting local businesses are valuable cultural innovations and are here to stay.

Nevertheless, now that authenticity is obsolete it’s become difficult to remember why we were suspicious of brands and commodities to begin with. Maintaining criticality is a fundamental challenge in this new era of trust. Unfortunately, much of what we know about being critical is based on authenticity ethics. Carles blamed the Contemporary Conformist phenomenon on a culture industry hard-set on mining “youth culture dollars.” This very common yet extraordinarily reductive argument, which makes out commodity capitalism to be an all-powerful, intrinsically evil force, is typical of authenticity believers. It assumes a one-way influence of a brand’s actions on consumers, as do the field of semiotics and the hopeless, authenticity-craving philosophies of Baudrillard and Debord.

Yet now, as Dena Yago says, “you can like both Dimes and Doritos, sincerely and without irony.” If we no longer see brands and commodity capitalism as something to be resisted, we need more nuanced forms of critique that address how brands participate in society as creators and collaborators with real agency. Interest in working with brands, creating brands, and being brands is at an all-time high. Brands and commodities therefore need to be considered and critiqued on the basis of the specific cultural and economic contributions they make to society. People co-create their identities with brands just as they do with religions, communities, and other other systems of meaning. This constructivist view is incompatible with popular forms of postmodern critique but it also opens up new critical opportunities. We live in a time where brands are expected to not just reflect our values but act on them. Trust in business can no longer be based on visual signals of authenticity, only on proof of work."

"That vision is spreading. Just north of New York City, a start-up company has built cabins in the woods that are advertised as retreat spaces for writing or taking a break from the grind of city life. It sounds and looks like a hermitage to me. The only thing missing is God."

…

"What does this mean for you, members of religious communities who might be reading this? A few things. Consider how closely hipster ideals, as portrayed in magazines and advertisements, now mirror central monastic ideals—simplicity, authenticity, community, self-sufficiency, contemplation. You have rules, long histories and theologies that illuminate these ideals and shape your daily rhythms. Hipsters do not.

One way to engage the world might be to help hipsters—I write as one of them—understand why we find it gratifying to make our own bread, tend our own gardens or brew our own beer. What is it about bodily practices and habituation that speaks to our souls? We know the slowness of our hobbies does something to us, but we don’t quite know what it is.

To learn, we will have to become aware of your existence and your gifts. So you ought to photograph your community and publish those photographs on Instagram. This practice offers an opportunity to meet people where they are—which, by and large, is not anywhere close to a contemplative religious life.

The average young adult spends over four hours of each day on her phone, and she checks social media channels an average of 17 times per day. Further, young people are averse to speaking about religion explicitly. They lack the imagination and vocabulary even to broach the subject of monastic life. But they do possess a highly developed visual grammar and are interested in stylized photographs of agriculture, cooking, handicraft, drinks and books.

Further, contemplative orders should reinsert themselves into the public sphere as the keepers and guardians of real mindfulness. The mindfulness moment that America is having is marred by an extreme sense of self-centeredness. But perhaps mindfulness is contemplation’s shadow on the cave wall. Of course, cultivating a contemplative life requires a lifetime of struggle, a challenging proposition in our age of instant gratification. But a simple—admittedly gimmicky—change of language, from contemplation to “monastic mindfulness,” could generate an audience of people willing to read your articles or attend your retreats. You may not need or even want that audience, but they need you.

All of which is to say, you have a fascinating preaching opportunity, and when this bizarre cultural moment shifts, you will lose that opportunity. So start an Instagram account. Take advantage of the fact that your daily lives entail much of what the authenticity hounds are clamoring after. Take photos of your gardens, your chapels, your candles, your table spread with a feast day dinner.

Perhaps you have an industrial kitchen, buy your food at Sam’s Club and haven’t had a butcher block table in 50 years. Not to worry. Photograph your icons and your books. Document your community as it prays or goes for walks or enjoys recreation. (As we know from Paweł Pawlikowski and Paolo Sorrentino, cassocks and habits are very cinematic.) Tag these photographs with a hashtag like #monklife or #nunlife. Slowly but surely, you will start to develop a following. The Benedictine Monks of Meath, Ireland, who run a wonderful Instagram, have over 900 followers. That may not sound like a lot when many middle schoolers have thousands, but it is a solid start.

Finally, if you belong to an order that supports itself through handicraft or food production, you should market your wares under the hipster umbrella. Los Angeles’s Ace Hotel, the popular hipster hotel chain, is ornamented with handmade leather knickknacks and woolen blankets available for purchase at a hefty price. Maybe those blankets could be woven by your community? In the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, a hip men’s store sells “Incense of the West,” which smells suspiciously like church incense. Perhaps that store could be selling your incense instead? Write to hipster boutiques and high-end urban specialty food shops and see if they will stock your products. Your community will make some money, but more important, it will garner interest and curiosity.

A notable American example of monastic engagement can be found in Spencer, Mass., where the Cistercians at St. Joseph Abbey, worried about the costs of running their community, recently started brewing the first Trappist beer in the United States. So many fans were clamoring to visit the abbey and tour the brewery that this past summer the brewery opened its doors to the general public for one day.

•••

Of course, the compatibility of Catholic and hipster visions of authenticity breaks down at a certain point. The Catholic Church, by definition, runs counter to the ideas of exclusivity that hipsterdom associates with authenticity. The church is for everyone. Nonetheless, in tapping into the current hipster lifestyle craze, you have a chance to share what a truly authentic life looks like: a life grounded in God.

Before you go all-in, however, a word of caution. To introduce Instagram or Snapchat into your community could threaten your own attention span. Smartphones and social media might distract the mind from prayer and contemplation. If you are a cloistered community, employing social media or engaging the world through mindfulness presents an implicit threat to your cloistered lifestyle and your vocation. You are no doubt well aware of these threats.

But as St. Augustine writes in De Doctrina Christiana: “We were not wrong to learn the alphabet just because they say that the god Mercury was its patron, nor should we avoid justice and virtue just because they dedicated temples to justice and virtue.” I am not advocating packing smartphones in your cassocks and habits. I am suggesting that you wade into the stream with care. For at the moment, the world needs your wisdom and your model of the good life almost as much as it needs your prayers."

[my favorite display font, the story = delightful, hard to believe I never bookmarked this before]

"OSP-Crickx is a digital reinterpretation of a set of adhesive letters.

The Publi Fluor shop was situated in the northern part of Brussels, Schaerbeek, and founded by the father of Madame Christelle Crickx who was a trained letter painter. In his day he is—it seems—the first to propose fluorescent colors for shopwindow signs. It proves so difficult to paint letters on site with that kind of unstable coating that he develops a technique based on vinyl that he fluo-colors and cuts by hand in the workplace, then sticks at clients shops. Around 1975, his health degrades quickly and his daughter is forced to step into the business.

[image]

Starting to cut letters with the rounded and skilled cardboard templates drawn by her father, Madame Crickx slowly morphs the shapes by analysing how typographic niceties confuse her non-trained clients and leads to bad letters placement. She progressively removes the optical compensation of rounded tops and bottoms, straightens sides, and attaches accents for less floating parts. Those moves add a very specific orientation to this otherwise quite common bold italic sans serif display typeface.

During about fifty years these craft lettres have spread across the windows of shopping streets, more and more, and after the closure of the shop in the early noughties, they seem to still hold their own to the assaults of vector vinyl cutting technology.

[image]

In 1996, Pierre Huyghebaert and Vincent Fortemps have just started to work for the cultural center les Halles de Schaerbeek. For a series of events linked to India, an interest to mix local and distant vernacular takes shape. Those letters spotted on Schaerbeek’s shopwindows years before seem to fit the job ideally. After a few wanderings in the streets nearby, the small lettershop at the bottom of the dull Avenue Rogier, shining with its fluo shapes, is finally spotted as the origin of these typographic waves… And the inside of the shop proves to be even more amazing.

First contacts with Madame Crickx follow, the first poster is typeset letter by letter, then Pierre Huyghebaert pays other visits and it becomes obvious that these letters deserve more than a one-time usage, as Madame Crickx’s work deserves more than simply buying some letters more. For the following Halles assignments, after a quick-and-dirty Fontographer vectorisation, the Crickx font is heavily used. This font is called the Crickx Rush in reference of the time constrains that characterize this kind of operation. When Jan Middendorp, then Editor of the Belgian fontshop magazine Druk, orders an article on the letters, it is the occasion for Pierre to try to investigate and understand better the process described herebefore. (Astonishingly, shortly before the magazine stops, a poll seems to have elected the article as one of the most favoured by the readers…).

[image]

When Madame Crickx follows the retirement of her postman husband, the studio Speculoos (where Pierre works) buys the whole stock of letters and dingbats and vinyle for a symbolic prize, stores it in their basement of Saint-Gilles but uses it for some of their funkiest windowshop displays. He ask Madame Crickx to cut lower-cases for her letters as with other accented and diacritics to cover more or less the Latin-1 codepage, by trying to give her just enough sample to distinguish the characters but not much to influence the way to draw them. As answers, she cut a completely new and fantasy set of letters (called the blobby in the pack)… After a discussion, she propose new lower-case, more in sync with the upper cases classical ones, but not sharing exactly the same low contrast. After years of sleeping on hard-drive and archives, in 2010, Ludi Loiseau and Antoine Begon uplift the work to redraw the outlines to produce a more complete and less trashy version (Regular), explore the non-italic more rare one (Droite Rush and Droite) and extend it with lower cases (SharkCut). Finally, the Crickx’s cabinet regains a better place at the new Constant Variable place, Rue Gallait 80, less than a kilometer far from the original shop place…

More :
– Pdf of the article in Dutch (translated by Jan Middendorp and French (original).
– Text by Femke Snelting

We are very happy to receive news from what you do or works you spot that use these fonts!
On est très heureux de recevoir des infos à propos de travaux que vous réalisez ou que vous remarquez qui utilisent ces fontes!"

"The journalists, artists and curators at the press preview for the Museum of Arts and Design's new exhibition, Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Mid-century and Today, were about 90 per cent female – an unusually high percentage, according to the museum's publicist.

But the imbalance seemed about right, in that it reflected the continuing, uneasy, and gendered relationship between people who make things out of yarn, clay or cloth and people who make things out of glass, steel or plastic. The editors of a few blogs seemed unsure whether the contents of the show – four hanging woven-wire sculptures by Ruth Asawa, screen-printed geometric textile designs by Anni Albers, a test panel for the gold-embroidered tapestries for the Ford Foundation by Sheila Hicks, along with work by 39 other artists – even counted as "design" for their purposes.

"In the 1950s and 1960s, an era when painting, sculpture and architecture were dominated by men, women had extensive impact in alternative materials such as textiles, ceramics and metals," reads the wall text.

Starting with the Bauhaus weaving workshop, eventually led by the supremely talented Gunta Stolzl, modern women with visual talent were shunted into creative professions closer to traditional women's work, and many of them found what they made then treated as lesser-than. Half of MAD's collection is work by women, and with this exhibit, curated by Jennifer Scanlan, the museum hopes to expand ideas about who, and what, constitutes mid-century design.

The problem of terminology has bedeviled this work from the start. When the Museum of Modern Art first showed fibre art in the 1969 show Wall Hangings, artist Louise Bourgeois wrote, in the magazine Craft Horizons, "the pieces in the show rarely liberate themselves from decoration." Fear of fibre, it seems, lives on.

The irony is that, while women were largely unwelcome in architecture and industrial design as practitioners, male architects and manufacturers found they couldn't live without them. Most of the highlighted mid-century designers worked with architects to bring nature, texture and colour to their hard-edged spaces, and several worked with manufacturers as designers and translators – for publicity purposes – of new styles and materials for a mass audience."

…

"Today craft seems to be heading in two directions simultaneously. Handicraft has never been more popular among women – it seems like every third person on Instagram has bought a handloom to ape Hicks or Maryanne Moodie, while companies like Wool and the Gang give you the option of ready-made or knit-your-own trendy, chunky apparel.

There is a renewed interest in personal making that has been nourished by social networks and is now being reabsorbed by mainstream consumer culture, without the politics and made by who-knows-whose hand. Urban Outfitters, which once sold an Anni Albers washer necklace kit, now sells the Magical Thinking Macrame Wall Hanging.

"On the flip side, there's the emergence of technological craft, with which architects seem to feel more comfortable and which does turn up on design sites like this one. (The computer defeminises everything.) Here again screens of various types provide a bridge between the hard and the flexible, the wall and the textile.

Petra Blaisse's contributions to many OMA projects (the carpets at the Seattle Public Library, for example) are machine-made textiles that, like Bertoia screens, humanise spaces as a form of permanent nature. The openwork pattern on her curtains for Machado and Silvetti's Chazen Museum nods to the sheers and geometries popular in mid-century designs.

Danish architect Mette Ramsgard Thomsen calls her work "digital crafting," and her 2012 Shadow Play installation demonstrates another way to introduce softness and hanging into built space. In that piece, long curls of pine veneer were bent into loops, connected with copper wire, and sandwiched between two pieces of glass in a storefront. The effect was like a carved screen, but lighter, and far less effort. It could be included in a new MoMA exhibition called Wall Hanging, one far more antiseptic than its 1969 predecessor.

I'll freely admit my preference for the wilder shores of the handmade, irregular and a little too bright. Even if Louise Bourgeois didn't find it challenging enough on first encounter, the continuing gender politics around craft, as well as the difficulty around the classification of the work of people like Albers, Asawa, Bryk, Hicks, Tawney and Phillips, reveal a spikiness that continues to command attention."

Funny, that’s how I start all my stand-up comedy gigs. It kills of course. So I wanted to start with a quote from James Haug’s Why I Like Chapbooks (Factory Hollow, 2011), who waxes lyrical “Chapbooks are stealth books./ They can slip under a door./ They don’t impose. They suggest./ They’re not one thing or another. They don’t take much time. They’re sly and easy to ignore. They imply, insinuate, inquire./ They don’t expect an answer./ They have a long history; they have no history.”

Chapbooks are the currency of underground poetry publishing, and tied to a sense of community and gift-ish economy, mostly run by poets who want to give something back and create a home for the work they believe in. Chapbooks are the new of the new, in the world of poetry most poets’ first publications come through chapbooks, so if you want to know the future (of poetry), read chapbooks. Chapbooks tend to be exciting and tied to a counter-culture because they provide a space for more experimental, esoteric or avant-garde work to be published that contests and university presses or bigger presses who may be more concerned with money wouldn’t take the risk on or didn’t think would sell…Chapbooks are like the opposite of money. Which is so money!

Chapbooks also have such a materiality and visceral physical life, because they are mostly handmade and handbound and come in all shapes, sizes (from Small Fires matchbooks to The Pines LP records) and textures imaginable (god I love texture!), made from old military uniforms, childhood blankets, prison cups, cardboard, vinyl, rubber, bolts, matchbooks, you name it. It is this handmade element and imagination and of course each chapbook’s limited nature that gives them such value, and ties them to history and an archival existence. Chapbooks are a link to the human that I think is more important than ever right now in the face of ever increasing digital media and publishing, Chapbooks are like Sarah Connor and her son (John Connor) facing the Terminators in Terminator 2: the hope of all mankind and the future of the human race lie in their hands. Also, they are perfect to read on the subway!"

"Hidden among the trees of an Italian forest, Bruno has been building swings, slides, seesaws, gyroscopes and roller-coasters for the last forty years. They are his passion and a way to attract clients to Ai Pioppi, the restaurant he runs with his family. Throughout this short documentary, his hand-powered toys move alongside his thoughts about existence and death; and why he spent more than half of his life creating rides."

"Surely we appreciate the handmade in part because it is handmade. An object or a meal has different meaning and significance if we know it to be the product of a human being working skilfully with tools rather than a machine stamping out another clone. Even if in some ways a mass-produced object is superior in its physical properties, we have good reasons for preferring a less perfect, handcrafted one."

"Blindness, far from making tests fair, actually robs us of knowledge of what is most important, while perpetuating the illusion that all that really matters is how it feels or seems at the moment of consumption."

"In a very roundabout way, this cuts to an important problem with "the critique" as commonly practiced in which students and instructors are asked in some way to talk about the work as if they were conducting a blind taste test. Forget that you know the person that made this painting, forget that you had dinner with them last night, cut all affective ties and speak solely of the work. Galleries perform a similar severing function, much like supermarket displays, turning the entire process of aesthetic experience into a branding exercise, with a carefully constructed history devoid of anything truly human."

"I keep coming across cool design shorts (especially on Vimeo) that are very inspirational. Rather then make individual posts, I thought we should start an on going thread. So if you know of a good short, lets see it."

"It was 1968, and a left-wing student rebellion in Paris resonated worldwide. He says he imbibed the spirit of rebellion, and it changed him.

“Until Occupy, the greatest political movement I’d ever seen was the uprising of ’68. It really inspired me, and I’ve been running on that energy — and have been trying to recapture it — ever since.”"

"He [Aiden Enns] describes himself as a “progressive Mennonite” and says his approach is a “pretty mellow campaign not driven by high-energy organizers.”

Advocating a life of material simplicity and spiritual richness, Mr. Enns urges people to “make things for others themselves, not to just go out and buy.” He says he and his wife make gifts like wooden figurines and animal dolls for children, and salsa and relish for adults."

MR. LASN freely acknowledges that he is inconsistent… doesn’t make gifts for friends and family; he buys them… says his lifestyle isn’t really sustainable…"

"Words and letters catch my eye pretty much everywhere I go. Some are ugly, some are beautiful, and some are simply bizarre. All are working hard to communicate something, but sometimes they communicate more than they mean to: humor, irony, poetry, or even something mysteriously poignant. That’s when I take out my camera.
We will be close... staring from now into forever."

"Our bar is arguably a lot of work. We bake scratch on bar, make ice cubes, offer any one we think is thirsty a mason jar of water (even if they are getting coffee to go), melt chocolate for drinks, make vanilla syrup, handwrite menus and business cards, and painstakingly make every cup of drip individually (while pre-rinsing to go cups, and getting cream and sugar for everyone (instead of leaving it out). And we handwash all dishware, while actively keeping track of our record player. Working bar is a dance. Enter Niko, our newest member, who came along with good words from former Little Red Bike Cafe worker.

With a flat of strawberries we ride Farmers Market to bar. With fifty burlap coffee bags we stack high on our porteur racks and deliver to friends for their projects. Hundreds of pounds we are moving in a day by bicycle. Pouring rain keeps us wet and tired, yet still everything is pretty awesome."

"By focusing on products created entirely by hand, we hope more people will be moved by and treasure the essence of raw materials."

"BrutCake is a creative concept covering products, art and most importantly – life.

Brut refers to the Art Brut movement originating in France, and is an apt description of the raw, original and essential elements of Brut Cake products. Cake evokes images of the simple pleasures and happiness in life.

We take the concept of Art Brut from a position of pure artistic ambition to one of functional creation. However, Brut Cake doesn’t see itself as an industrial design shop; instead, we devote ourselves to handcrafted, useful and functional objects of art.

Such is our belief in the longevity and beauty of raw materials, we also see treasure where others see only waste. Combining elements from discarded furniture and the like, we re-imagine them into new functional pieces, bringing a new life and aesthetic to these recycled gems."

"There are many ways in which interactions with designers can benefit artisans. Designers can improve the quality of objects being made, and sometimes reduce the use of raw materials. They can be effective communicators to consumers back home, and explain intangible qualities of an object such as its historical context. …

Borges further counsels that “the potential dangers of a badly carried out intervention are many, and their effects can be damaging. The older a tradition is, and the more “away from civilization” the community it belongs to, the greater the dangers and the greater the necessary care”.

The basis for these north-south interactions, for Borges, must be respect – “respect for the work rhythm of the artisan, respect for the signs that have resisted over the years, respect for the whole system of symbols that culminates in an object”."

"When it comes to profit and satisfaction, craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy. Many of the manufacturers who are thriving in the United States (they exist, I swear!) have done so by avoiding direct competition with low-cost commodity producers in low-wage nations. Instead, they have scrutinized the market and created customized products for less price-sensitive customers. Facebook and Apple, Starbucks and the Boston Beer Company (which makes Sam Adams lager) show that people who identify and meet untapped needs can create thousands of jobs and billions in wealth. As our economy recovers, there will be nearly infinite ways to meet custom needs at premium prices."

"We recently stumbled upon Etsy’s provocative, short film about H.G. “Skip” Brack and his 42-year quest to single-handedly recycle and restore every tool in Maine. His goal? To help artisans, craftsmen, welders, mechanics—and anyone else who works with their hands—create beautiful things.

Of course, this got us thinking: what was the last thing we built, not for money or merit, but for the simple satisfaction of knowing we handcrafted something beautiful?"

"Rasmus Gjesing founded Cykelmageren in 1994 by opening a shop in Copenhagen. After a 6 months period of time doing only reparations on bikes with a mainstream look and in bad quality, he got inspired and began building and selling bikes in own design. He wished to break new ground by creating a unique product that was made to last and through out the history of the company this has been the basic idea of the concept. The demand for handmade bikes made expand naturally needed. From thereon the company developed into being a team of innovative quality- enthusiasts, all taking turns building the bikes at the workshop in the north of the city. A Cykelmageren handmade bike is individually ordered and build regarding every costumers needs and wishes and the aim for flexibility and special adjustment is good…"

"Call me materialistic — they’re just things after all. But the pattern I noticed in the submissions to this theme is that they aren’t just things. The handcrafted heirlooms mentioned here are ties to the past and the future. The contributors who wrote about them would run back into a burning building for them. And the skills shared are among the most important gifts a family member could pass along.<br />
<br />
Many of the captions mention a concern for a dying art, in the wake of industrialization. But as long as people are people, we’ll keep using our hands to combine raw materials, time, and care into something greater."

"Designer Noriko Daishima runs a small shop, café and creative studio in her home in Shanghai. Located in the French Concession, on Xingguo Lu, she calls her place Le Petit Xiaoxiao (small, small, small) and keeps it open for friends and their friends during the weekends. Last Saturday, we visited Noriko for a chat and green tea."

"Like us, many people found their way to Noriko’s through a friend’s recommendation. We heard about the place from Satoko and Kok-Meng, a Shanghai-based couple who met each other at Le Petit Xiaoxiao and later founded KUU design office together. “I wanted to create a small creative community by making my home a meeting place,” Noriko tells us about her activities resonating Chinese communality. “I have made many new friends at my place.”"

[Update 18 July 2012: Sad to see this post is gone and not available in the Wayback Machine.]

"Gravel & Gold is a shop in the Mission District of San Francisco run by three ladies, Cass, Lisa, and Nile. We sell useful goods from stand-up makers—hand-picked vintage and new things to wear, to adorn, to hear, to read & write, to furnish, and to love up. We like to know where our things come from and to directly support the people who create them."

"Lloyd Kahn claims that shelter is more than a roof over your head. As the author and publisher of over a dozen books on home construction, Lloyd has been grappling with the concept of home, physically and psychically, for over five decades. Situated in the financial and housing crisis, this film profiles Lloyd's ideas on do-it-yourself construction and sustainability."

"destination for do-it-yourself style...a virtual sewing circle, an open-source hub of ideas, expertise, and amazing patterns you can download & sew at home. We want you to learn something new every time you visit BurdaStyle. We want this website to inspire you...we want you to get involved: We're offering our ideas, expertise and downloadable patterns to the BurdaStyle community, and we hope that you'll contribute, too. There are many ways to be a part of BurdaStyle. Discuss sewing tricks and fixes with members of the BurdaStyle community. Add your sewing term definitions to the ones in our Sewpedia, or check out tips in our user-generated photo and video How Tos. Explore other users' creations in the Gallery, and upload photos of your own. You can even barter or sell what you make through BurdaStyle: Burda is the first established pattern publisher to release its designs without copyrights, allowing members of the public to market their BurdaStyle creations in limited editions."

kitten: "i had always wanted to build a bike with car wheels just because of the absurdity of it. early in 2008 i saw a mismatched pair of car/truck wheels next to a dumpster. after waiting a few weeks the wheels were not moved or removed i figured the best fate for them was to be repurposed for a bicycle. the original concept wat to build the bike completely square and have all square tubing connect at 90 degree angles. any round tubing would meet at non-right angles. the bike was later adjusted by sloping the top tube down allowing for a better seating position. a moveable headlight was added with two solar headlights, it was painted yellow and became the kitten."

"When Maloof was still struggling to support his family, he turned down several lucrative offers to mass-produce his furniture — on principle. The black sheep of the family who never went to college now has three honorary degrees."

"My guess is, so long as the US dollar remains the global reserve currency, it’s going to be tough for local food and fashion to become a mass movement instead of a conscious political statement. While that may not be great news for the makers, it’s probably good economic news - as much as I like the steak, I’d be pretty unhappy if the Obama administration started looking to Argentina for macroeconomic advice."

"...she falls & flails in categories: a specially-made low-run piece, either hand-tooled or machine-made, that would lose its context as a mass-produced item, and is not viable to produce in large quantities. And/or an item that is in concept stage as a byproduct of the previous""

"mass customization has taken longer than predicted [beacause] been looking in wrong place. Re-tooling large companies to do mass customization is too hard, micro-niches are too small, too much fear of cannibalization, resistance to change."

"we make each and every custom bag ourselves, completely from scratch. From start to finish. We take your order, cut out your materials, and sew everything together with our own two hands. Then we check and double-check every stitch, pack up your bag and

"We are consigned to communicating through design, but it’s an impoverished language that can only say one thing: “That’s cool.” Design ceases to serve our needs, and the superficial qualities of useful things end up cannibalizing their functionality. The palpability of the design interferes, distracts from the activity an item is supposed to be helping you do. The activity becomes subordinate to the tools. You become the tool."

"in the past couple of years, new online marketplace startups targeted specifically at the needs of independent artists and crafts people have emerged. Below we'll take a brief look at three such startups as well as eBay."

"your connection to crafting events of all sorts, all over the globe! ICS is a user-driven calendar of craft shows, trunk shows, festivals, any anywhere else you can buy or sell totally awesome handmade goods. Best of all, it's completely FREE to list an

"We are a business website guide geared towards independent entrepreneurs in the creative and design fields. Our goal at IndieEntrepreneur.com is simplify the business process and offer concise, helpful tips in starting out, stepping up, and successfully